Black scholars left out of journal issue on Black Lives Matter

Published 1:18 pm, Friday, June 9, 2017

People join a rally May 10 organized in part by the New Haven, Conn., chapter of Black Lives Matter to protest the death of Jayson Negron during a pursuit by Bridgeport police officers.

People join a rally May 10 organized in part by the New Haven, Conn., chapter of Black Lives Matter to protest the death of Jayson Negron during a pursuit by Bridgeport police officers.

Photo: Christian Abraham, Hearst Connecticut Media

Black scholars left out of journal issue on Black Lives Matter

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A leading journal of political philosophy took up the Black Lives Matter movement in its June issue without a single contribution from a black academic, triggering an outcry from African American scholars.

Many black scholars said they felt insulted and ignored, and some took to social media to express their indignation. Two wrote open letters to the Journal of Political Philosophy.

The journal’s editors were apologetic for what they conceded was an “especially grave oversight” and vowed to increase diversity on its editorial board and in its pages.

The episode highlights what some intellectuals say is a lack of diverse voices in the influential research journals where having a paper accepted is often vital to advancing in the publish-or-perish world of academia.

“This is not an abstract philosophical question. There are real goods at stake when we talk about which voices count,” said Yale University philosopher Chris Lebron, who recently completed a book on Black Lives Matter and wrote one of the letters to the journal.

The journal is a peer-reviewed academic quarterly that explores topics such as sociology, history, economics and race. It devoted part of its latest issue to a “symposium” on Black Lives Matter, inviting three white scholars to contribute articles on racial bias, law enforcement and the right to personal security.

UCLA political scientist Melvin Rogers, one of the black scholars who raised objections with the journal, called the lack of black voices “especially egregious” in this case.

“You have a major social movement that comes about because of police violence and a failure of the state to respond effectively,” Rogers said. “You put together a symposium ... and construct it in such a way that replicates the very problem the movement is trying to respond to. The signal this sends to scholars of color that care about this is that they, too, are invisible.”

The journal editors responded: “We accept the point eloquently and forcefully made by our colleagues that this is an especially grave oversight in light of the specific focus of Black Lives Matter on the extent to which African Americans have been erased and marginalized from public life.”

Some scholars suggested that journals are reflecting and compounding a larger problem in academia: the small number of black scholars. Two percent of faculty members at the nation’s top institutions are black, according to Ivory Toldson, editor of the Journal of Negro Education.

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Toldson said black scholars also must contend with the long-held belief among some whites that blacks cannot write about race with objectivity.

Errin Haines Whack is an Associated Press writer.

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